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Perl 5 completes move to Git

The Git distributed source code management system has won over another major project, Perl 5. The Perl Foundation has announced that they have completed moving the source code of Perl 5 from Perforce to Git and are now opening the system up for developer use. Git is the open sourced source code control system created by Linus Torvalds to manage Linux development. The move to Git gives developers equal and easier access to the Perl source code and the distributed nature of git will allow developers to work on experimental changes to the language more easily.

The migration took a year to do. Sam Vilain of Catalyst IT spent his spare time and some of his work time developing tools over that year to migrate the entire history of Perl 5 into Git and on creating a single unified repository of Perl. The repository actually goes all the way back to Perl 1 and Larry Wall's earliest changes to the language. Nicholas Clark, the manager of Perl 5.8.9 which was released last week, said "I'm looking forward to Git giving me the ability to work either online or offline. Perforce is great when I have a network connection, but until now those times when I've been trying to develop on trains or planes, at stations or airports, I'm back in the 'dark ages' before version control. Git solves this problem and more".

The new repository is now open at http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git. The repository has been provided thanks to hardware and system administration time donated by Booking.com who have also recently donated $50,000 to the Perl Foundation to aid the maintenance and development of Perl and, in particular, Perl 5.10.